More Ruminations on a Century-Long War

Álvaro Vargas Llosa weighs in on tnr.com:

A decade ago, the U.N. General Assembly set an objective of "eliminating or significantly reducing" narcotics cultivation and trafficking "by the year 2008." According to the data of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, the effort has been an unmitigated disaster. Opium and cannabis production has doubled, while cocaine has slightly increased. The same proportion of adults--5 percent--consumes drugs today, mostly marijuana, as in 1998.

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A movement in favor of legalization has existed in the United States for years. Because it is associated with the cultural war that has raged since the 1960s, its impact has been small. But the debate goes on. In many states the police do not go after personal possession of marijuana, and California is considering a bill that would make it legal. The vestiges of Puritan dogmatism--which H.L. Mencken memorably called the "inferior man's hatred of the man who is having a better time"--have made it difficult to open a serious debate nationwide.

He's right that the legalization movement's links to the counterculture movement have limited its mainstream popularity, and made it seem like a crackpot notion only hippies could support. As a political matter, people in favor of legalization should work to disassociate themselves with radicalism as much as possible.

For its part, Poder supports a change in tactics along the lines of that suggested by the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy:

One: treat consumption of drugs as a public health problem; two: reduce consumption through informative and preventative actions, and three: channel the pressure on organized crime. In other words, that not everything should be prohibition and repression.

That's all quite sensible, but this part of the story irritated me:

Colombia and Mexico have been the two countries most affected by this war. At the end of the past century, Colombia lived one of the most terrible spirals of violence on the continent, a mix of guerillas, paramilitaries, and drug traffickers. The traffickers sought to impose their law. And one of them, Pablo Escobar Gaviria, unleashed a war against the state, in which he didn't hesitate, among other things, to bring down airplanes and assassinate various presidential candidates.

Mexico today lives through circumstances as bad or worse, thanks to the aggressiveness of the drug kingpins.

How can that statement be defended? There's no Mexican gang blowing up planes and killing presidential candidates, or, for that matter, assaulting the Supreme Court. Likewise, there are no paramilitary or guerilla movements to speak of. Mexico today, at its apogee of drug violence, has a murder rate about a third of Colombia's right now, to say nothing of 15 or 20 years ago, when in parts of Colombia murder by firearm was the leading cause of death. Saying Mexico is today as bad or worse than Colombia in the 1980s and '90s is like saying the sky is green.